Nonfiction by Stacie Eirich
Airports are teeming with constant activity: people rushing, people eating, people waiting. It’s not until I’m in one again that I realize just how much humanity is out there. How busy so many lives are. How different but alike we are, carrying our bags and checking our devices, averting our eyes or carrying on conversations with those travelling with us; but more often silent, especially amongst strangers.
I struck up conversation with two ladies as we stood waiting on the walkway to board our flight. Looked them in the eyes: saw them spark and open, perhaps smiling beneath their masks. They were headed to South Carolina, and I told them I knew of its beauty and that my children were born there. They remarked “Small world!” I agreed, and soon we departed.
Waiting on my connection, I look around the gate and see people bent to their devices, eyes shadowed, faces closed. All ages and colors: dressed down and up, masked and unmasked. Out the large five-tiered windows the figures of jetliners loom, the tarmac abuzz with action as the planes taxi in and out, landing to refuel and prepare for another take-off. Busses, trucks and tugs pulling luggage loads pass, air-traffic controllers in orange vests wave wands. Down the runway the jetliners roll, pushing faster until their noses rise into a sky settled low with gray-blue clouds. A storm is brewing to the west; rain threatens to slow the surge of activity before long.
As I write, the people around me shift and change, the air inside the gate cool but comfortable, the chatter a murmur underneath the din of a drink machine and canned music from a club bar. I’m thirsty but don’t want to overpay for coffee or need to use the restroom on my flight, so I go without.
I notice that I’m the only one here with a notebook and pen, the only one stopping to look around, to notice this atmosphere, record this experience. For most, this moment is lost in the shuffle, only an access point to a destination: unmemorable.
I sit and watch what once was unimaginable; that humans would create a machine that could fly. Something that is now such an everyday occurrence that it is no longer of note. In the time I’ve been sitting here, how many airplanes have rolled by and taken off? 10, 20, 30? Perhaps more. It’s astounding, and humbling. I knew I was small, insignificant. Seeing just how vast humanity is and how much we’ve created is amazing and frightening.
Like everything, there is a poem in this. On that vast sky and the human-made machines that fly within it, on the people that surround me but remain apart, on how my heart and mind and hand (from writing so furiously with this pen) are aching to make sense of it all, on how I feel so much a part of this crush of humanness but at the same time: solitary, apart, alone.
A woman on an island, with her backpack, notebook and pen in the center of this aerial universe on Concourse D in Atlanta International, waiting for the jetliner that will fly her home.
Stacie Eirich is a mother, poet & singer in Louisiana. Her work is forthcoming in Synkroniciti Magazine. Her poem “Blossoms,” published in Susurrus Magazine in 2023, was nominated for The Pushcart Prize. In 2023, she lived in Memphis while caring for her child through cancer treatments at St. Jude. Read more at www.stacieeirich.com
